


Average Terry

by Atrem



Category: Skyforge (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-05-24 19:18:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 15,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6163758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Atrem/pseuds/Atrem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Terry is just a guy working a dead-end job in an office building when a collision with fate (and a late bus) send his entire world into question as the responsibilities of immortality are thrust upon him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Life and Death of Terry

By all accounts, Terry was a normal man with a normal life. The typically-sized man with typical intelligence left his overwhelmingly average house on an average September day. He placed his bets on the weather, leaving without umbrella or hat.

Twenty minutes later, the rain had soaked through his hair and down to his skin. He’d passed his usual bus stop on the way to this one, overcome by construction of a new subdivision of average cookie-cutter homes.

He sighed to himself as the bus arrived to carry him to his grey cubicle overlooking an ocean of cubicles just like it. He paid his ticket, sat in the back and just watched the people. As per routine, stories were created for each passenger:

The heartbreaker in blonde hair rode in the front of the bus to the billion dollar mansion that was a secret lair for an evil villain. The debonaire thief rode in the middle of the bus, sending shifting glances across every passenger around them – even making uncomfortably powerful eye contact with Terry.

“Mornin’ Terry,” said Damian as he entered. He looked over the drenched man in front of him. “Raining, huh?”

“Oh?” asked Terry, “I hadn’t noticed.” Walking past the desk he left a trail of footprints. Past the copier that ate every other document, through the break room that served only decaf, all the way to the edge of the planet where his little grey home waited.

He sat down, rearranging each of the papers on his desk into neat piles. Throwing the nearest pile immediately into the trash. He flicked the dog bobble-head and watched it idly nod towards him for a few moments.

“You’re right, Skippy,” he said. “It’s time for a break.”

He turned around to see a man leaning against the edge of his cubicle in suspenders and glasses. He cast a conscientious glare down towards Terry’s desk. He cleared his throat, an overwhelming smell of cigarette ash and Wite-Out.

“Mister Burger,” he said, sucking his teeth in a show of disappointment.

“Bherget,” Terry corrected.

“Berbet,” he tried again. “Did you get those employee satisfaction forms from Lila in HR yet?”

“No, Mister Kurt. I just got in.”

“Ahh,” he paused, sucking his teeth again. He pulled up his wrist, folding back the sleeve to expose a tacky Disney watch. He flicked it once, twice, before sighing. “My watch must be wrong. I swore it was 9 but if you got in, it must be 8.”

“It is 9, Mister Kurt.”

“Well, then you must not have just gotten in,” he said, looking over the desk to Terry’s computer, still not logged in. He scanned everything on the desk like an overly analytical robot. Suddenly those pearly yellows sneered up in a smile. “But it looks like you already finished an entire stack of paperwork! Consider yourself off the hook, for today.”

Terry pushed the trash bin under his desk before he spun out of his chair and passed his sneering manager. He literally ran into his favourite member of the HR department on his way back to the break room, sending papers flying every direction.

“Oh my god, Terry!” shrieked a panicked voice somewhere amid the papers falling slowly through the air. “God, this is going to take forever!”

“I’m sorry, Lily,” he said, bending to pick up the papers as best he could. “Kurt’s been riding me hard and, ugh, I think he’s just waiting for a chance to fire me.”

“Kurt’s not the only one,” she said. She grabbed helplessly as the last papers to hit the ground. She looked at him, his average brown eyes meeting her deep blue gaze. For a moment his heart stopped, as it did every day around this time when they ran into each other – usually with much less force. “I hear they’ve got some execs from out East coming in soon, they’re thinking of shutting this office down.”

“God dammit, Lily!” shouted a voice from somewhere in the HR cubicles. “We’re supposed to put that in the newsletter, not just talk about it willy-nilly like decrees from corporate are idle gossip!”

“Oh no,” said Lily in a hushed whisper. She pulled a strand of the ebony black hair from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “Miss Giger’s writing the cheques today – you know how that makes her. I better get back!”

“Well, did I ever tell you about the time that I had to sign --”

“Sorry, Terry,” she said. Turning away, clutching the papers like a newborn. “I’ve gotta go or she’s not going to be happy!”

“Oh,” Terry said, mostly to himself. “Okay.”

 

It was slow, the thousand-yard mile back to his desk. He skipped lunch, staring at the screensaver on his old CRT monitor. He could have counted the hours by the idle trips to the break room, the minutes by every sigh that came out of his boredom.

Eventually, the sound folding paper and logging out of computers filled the room – muffled by the pale brown cubicle fabric. He took that as his sign to leave, flicking the bobble head one last time for the day and heading towards the front door.

“Hey Terry,” said a large pale man waiting for him at the entrance. “Got those new HR forms yet? I heard that they’re going to be promoting someone this week. Do you think they’d let me borrow some stapes? I think they would – how much could they cost, like a dollar?”

Terry sighed and smiled at the man. “I really don’t know, Mort. I don’t think they’d like it.”

“Maybe I should just talk to Williston about it. Do you know Williston from accounting? His wife was in a car accident, she was fine. I’ve never been in a car accident myself but I bet that I’d be fine.”

“I don’t like driving,” said Terry with a smile. He stepped through the heavy glass doors into the parking lot out front of the office building, holding the door open. “Hey Mort, I’ll see you on Monday, yeah?”

“I think I’m going to make a bunch of drinks with the missus and sit by the fire. We’ve got one of those really old fires with --”

Terry sighed again as the door closed, leaving him in peace and quiet again. Birds sang somewhere, singing out a lament for the fading warmth.

The walk was uneventful as always, taking the extra time on the bus to browse through his phone. Everyone looked at him in unison when he laughed a little too loud at a dog pushing over half a dozen cats for a fallen piece of cake.

It was raining again when he got off the bus. He waved as a neighbour passed, stepping in to cross the street when suddenly it hit him. He’d forgotten his house keys on his desk at work. Terry didn’t realize how useless of a revelation that was as something else hit him.

 

There was something strange going on in front of Terry. People were running, brakes were screeching to a halt. Even the rain seemed to have stopped. It was almost like everything had just slowed down – just enough for him to see everything. Someone was below the bus, an arm hung loosely out in front of it – a thin but well toned arm, perfect for tennis.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” asked someone from behind Terry. With panic in his eyes, he turned to face this new entity. Something stared back below a black hood, with eyes sunken so far into its head only the faint glimmer of green light glinted through the dark sockets. “I really hate the rain, makes roads slippery, soaks through hoodies.”

Terry recoiled in fear, lashing out at the thing, the inhuman deathly thing. It took a step back, holding up gloved hands as a show of surrender.

“Woah, guy,” it said. “Just take it easy, huh? It takes a long time to put myself back together you know.”

Everything just seemed to click in Terry’s nebulous mind. As though all the images had just aligned themselves in the right order to tell the story – how he ended up here, seeing the world move so slowly with some beast of death.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Finnly, I guess,” it said. “If you really need to call me anything. A rose by any other name would still give me allergies just as bad, right?” It laughed to itself, a kind of hollow laugh. It held out its hand as though it expected Terry to just shake on it and all this awkwardness would be done with. Finnly never really was good at his job.

“You’re... I’m...” muttered Terry, pointing back and forth between the two of them standing there just off the side of the road.

“God, I always hated this part,” said Finnly, covering his face with a hand. “They couldn’t just assign me to something like soul reclamation or the one who leaves coins in couch cushions. No, I had to work recruitment.”

“Soul reclamation?”

He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “You forgot to look both ways, guy, now you’re flat as paper except a lot more... ‘ _splat,’_ you know? So, uh, just take a breath or two and when you’re good, we can talk about some business stuff.”

“I’m... I think,” Terry took the advice. He closed his eyes and tilted his head up into the sky. With a heavy breath or two, he felt a lot more calm than he had before. When he opened his eyes, everything seemed a bit more clear – as though a haze of anxiety had left the fringes of his vision. “I think I’m good.”

“Good? Good.” It flashed him a heart thumbs-up and placed one of the gloved hands on his shoulder. “So, I’ve got good news, really good news and... well, some pretty shitty news. Preferences?”

“Let’s start with the best,” he glanced back at the bus, to the sirens he could hear just over the haze of panic that seemed so far away from him.

“You’re immortal, guy! Boom! Live forever!”

“Like... forever?”

“Oh yeah, forever. Like forever and forever again. You are going to get so bored of suburbia.”

“Okay,” said Terry. “I guess that’s good. I mean, I don’t really want to die so that’s great.”

“Well, you’re already...,” Finnly glanced past Terry to the mess on the roadside. He never really understood mortals anymore – it had been so long since he’d thought in those kinds of terms. “I guess you don’t really get a second death.”

“What’s next then?”

“You’ve already got an assignment, no Limbo queues for you, guy! But... uh, well, nobody’s going to recognize you, guy. You’re dead. The guy you were is under that bus. We’ve got a bit of paperwork to go through before we can get you working – cleaning up a bit of loose ends before you can get started – but how about we go for a drink?”

“Yeah,” said Terry. “I think I could use one.”


	2. Dinner with the Dearly Departed

“This place really makes the best onion rings,” said the skull, still cloaked in its hood. Finnly fiddled with the drawstrings that hung loosely against his chest. His other hand held a drink he’d been nursing for the past few minutes a diet cola.

They’d been waiting for a while already and Terry just sat there staring, looking right into those eyeless pits with their green glinting. Terry sipped on his own drink, a beer made in town that the waitress had hyped as ‘the best thing ever done to barley.’  
It was okay. So was Terry, not good or bad, just okay.

“You know,” said Finnly. “I’ve been coming here since this place opened. It’s been kind of a wild ride, seeing the ownership change. Like all this progress just can’t be stopped by death, it just keeps moving.”  
“Like I don’t exist,” said Terry, taking another sip of the foamy beverage.

“Yeah, exactly!” said Finnly, with a certain excitement in his voice. He quickly calmed himself down looking back at the dearly departed in front of him. “Well, I mean, every life has meaning... it’s just, I don’t know. I guess I’m just rambling.”  
“So what do we do now?” asked Terry.

Instead of answering, Finnly just looked over Terry’s shoulder. He held out his hands like he was expecting a hug. Instead, the waitress just dropped a basket of chicken wings in front of him, setting down a side plate of onion rings.  
In a flash, Finnly had honey-garlic sauce smeared on his face and dripping from his fingers. “Oh my god,” he said. “It’s just like a little bit of heaven! You have to try one,” he held out a wing in Terry’s direction, leaning slightly over the table.

Terry leaned away from it and eventually, Finnly just sighed and pushed it into his mouth, bones and all. With a satisfied slurp, the wings were gone and the bowl was placed at the side of the table.

“So, heaven, huh?” asked Terry. “I really thought.”

“Maybe someday,” said Finnly between rings, the small stack quickly depleting. “I was told by my supervisor that there’s a big reward coming to us, something about a great beyond, but honestly, my supervisor also never told me that I’d lose my face, heh.”

“So there is a great beyond then?"

“Like I said, it’s no more concrete for me than it was for you,” he said, handing an onion ring over to Terry and placing it gingerly in his open palm. He tapped it twice with his own hand like one might pat a puppy. “Eat. Food still tastes just as good.”

Terry just looked at the onion ring in his hand, holding it up with two fingers to look at Finnly through the circle of greasy goodness. “Where does your food go?”

Finnly just kind of stopped for a moment mid-chew. He sat back in his chair and stared back at Terry. “You know, guy, I never really thought about that.” He pulled up his shirt, exposing the bleached white ribcage beneath. There were no stains of honey-garlic, no cracked wings, no onion rings.

With the bottom of his shirt in his hands, he shoved another onion ring in his mouth. He made a motion like he swallowed it but no ring ever hit the empty cavity where his stomach would be. He let his shirt down and flattened out the wrinkles with an absent-minded precision.

“Guess it just goes to the great beyond,” he said with a shrug.

Terry watched, mouth agape, in horror as in seconds every last onion ring on the plate disappeared into the great beyond by way of skeletal snacking. The skeleton glared at the last onion ring still held in Terry’s fingers. The gloved hands clenched and unclenched before, with a long sigh, he reached forward.

The onion ring was pushed into Terry’s gaping mouth. With the utmost of care, Finnly leaned over the table and patted Terry on the top of his head.

It really was the best onion ring Terry had ever had.

“See, good,” he said with a clear smile on his voice that his lack of lips could never really produce.

“How was the food, gentlemen?” asked the waitress as she came around to the table again.

“Wonderful, Mag,” said Finnly, wiping a pale green napkin against the bones of his face until the dark brown sauce gave way to clean whitewashed bone.

She smiled down at the skeleton and gathered the plates on the table, leaving a small white slip of paper. Finnly reached into the pocket of his hood and left a small amount of money on the table along with a large tip.

“Guy,” said Finnly, wrapping an arm over his shoulders as they walked through the doors of the restaurant. “We’ve got an appointment to make so we should get going. You’ll get to see the whole world from where we’re going!”

“Where’s that?”

“We’re going to the Astral Observatory,” he said. “Way off in the Capital. I hope your first time is as fun as mine was. I used to think the world was flat. It all seemed to make sense, then I died. During my assignment I was taken to the Astral Observatory, from there I could see the whole world in all its curvy delight. Like the perfect woman.”

“You thought the world was flat?” asked Terry as Finnly pulled a small device out of his pocket. A holographic screen scrolled out of it, covered in a dizzying amount of data.

“Well, when I put round things on the ground, they stayed there - flat,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Look, guy, I know I’m not the smartest but I can learn, yeah? Besides, I know it’s round now.”

“Thank gods,” said Terry under his breath.

“We’ve all got our blind spots.”

With a few deft strokes across the small holographic screen, the world began to fade from around them. Terry felt a spike of anxiety well up somewhere deep inside of him, some primeval reflex that said the world was not supposed to just disappear like that but it felt like more, like a culmination of everything so far.

“Don’t worry, guy, you’re going to love it.”


	3. It's Not the End of the World

The observatory splayed out before him when his eyes opened. One thing dominated, above everything else, the faint pink glow of holo emitters with a size unlike any other he’d ever seen. All the world, every last bit seemed to turn on an axis.

“You just going to look all day, guy?” asked the skeleton standing next to him. The grinning bleached white face looked at him, waiting for him to say something, to move. Finnly wondered for a moment if the teleportation had gone wrong, if some key and essential part of Terry’s brain was laying in the parking lot while the rest of him was here. “Guy? You alive in there?”

He hurled on the floor, spilling an onion ring and nothing else. “Fuck,” he gasped. “What the hell was that?”

“Yeah, I did the same thing my first time too.”

Terry watched in bewilderment as the mess he’d made faded away bit by bit, seeming to drift off with the breeze that wafted off of the capital’s skylines. Around him were hundreds of others, immortals so diverse that they could hardly be put into a group together and yet they were - they were the guardians.

He’d been taught about them in school, the guardians that allowed life to grow, nurtured it and where they walked, people flourished. He’d heard about them, but as an echo, as tales spread from one to another. They’d always been a mystery and now, here they were - here he was.

“They’re tall, aren’t they?” asked Finnly, grinning from bare cheekbone to bare cheekbone. “I don’t know if they get taller or if I just get shorter. You’ll be tall like them someday, guy, big and godly. Now get up, you’re embarrassing me.”

Terry grabbed onto Finnly’s arm, feeling the sleeves move loosely around the bone beneath it. He pulled himself up by the sleeve, unwittingly nearly toppling the skeleton over.

“Sorry,” said Terry in a hushed whisper that never even reached Finnly. He was lost in his own mind as he saw the shelves rearrange themselves. It vaguely reminded him of nightmares he’d had as a child, lost in a maze of bookshelves, trying to return an overdue book.

“Gods,” said Finnly, starting to drag the absent man along towards a desk in the far side of the observatory. Terry shoes scraped against the hard, perfectly polished tile floor. “Your file was right. You really are hopeless.”

“File?”

“Yes, guy, they have files on everyone up here. From birth to burial you’re listed, given a number, a picture of your potential and a portrait of where you stand now,” he explained it with an almost poetic, practiced nature. “We’ve all got one, forever and ever. From fertilization to fossilization,” he seemed to grin at himself for a moment before giving another hard tug on Terry’s clothing.  
“Can I see it?” asked Terry, watching the shelves move around the large round room. He wondered which contained his file, just how much they knew about him, but the skeletal grip on his shirt was unbreakable.

“Nobody gets to see their own file, not even the Master of Lists and he tends to literally every other record on every person who has ever existed,” he said as Terry was finally let go in front of a large, ornate desk that seemed to dwarf him. “Don’t talk about Ledas,” was the only advice that Finnly gave him before he noticed the god-sized creature sitting in the desk. ‘Don’t talk about Ledas’ seemed like some kind of code phrase to Terry, one he hadn’t been prepared for - a gibberish phrase.

The large creature behind the desk wore a heavily furrowed brow above two squinting eyes with comedically small glasses. With a bit of a sneer, he loomed over Terry, nearly twice his height and at least twice as wide.

“Terrance Cornelius Berghet,” said the creature, like it was tasting the words as they left his mouth. “Ah, yes. Terrance, recently departed, automobile accident, yes?”

“Yes,” Terry said, trying not to sound meek in front of this creature. Even the desk had an unnatural pull on him, the top of it coming to just below his eye-level. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two gloved hands reach up over the top as Finnly hoisted himself onto the desk, coming to lay on the desk, his legs dangling off.

“Finnly,” said the creature, turning to the skeleton. “Do you mean to interrupt the delicate nature of my workspace?”

“You know it, big guy,” said Finnly with a big skeletal grin on his face.

“You should try harder. Mr. Berghet, we have much to discuss,” the muffled voice of the creature as it bent down to reach something in its desk. To the left, another shelf shifted, darting below the floor and away, another one taking its place a moment later. The creature reached forward with a large hand and grabbed a large folder wedged between two tomes, “Decorum Primis Invicto” and “501 Aelion Insects.”

Terry watched as the creature opened the folder, watching dust drift out of it. “You are lucky, Mr. Berghet, most must wait in limbo for weeks before they are assigned. You have been preapproved for a position as an immortal guardian. I see that your home region is in need of a... replacement. Yes, that will do.”  
“What?” asked Terry. Finnly was watching the blank expression on his face.

“Mr. Berghet, please pay attention. This is important,” the creature said with a massive sigh. “You are being assigned to your home region, Grimsby, to function as an immortal guardian. I will put on your list, one century of work before you must make your decision to turn towards or away from the Void.”

“You’re an immortal, Terry,” said Finnly with a laugh.

“Have you any questions, Mr. Berghet?” asked the creature, looking down at the small man.

“How am I supposed to protect people? Protect them from what?”

“If your immortal abilities have not descended yet then I fear for Grimsby indeed,” said the Master of Lists with another sneer. “We have many enemies, Mr. Berghet. I’m sure you have heard of them, Oceanids, Mechanoids, Reapers. All would see your world ended. All must be destroyed. Now,” said the creature, slamming a hand on the desk with a massive grin on his face. “It is time to assign supplementary tasks. Your region is quiet, Mr. Berghet, so like your predecessor, you will be given a supplementary task - in this case, you will sustain yourself. Reintegrate into your community.”

The Master of Lists closed the folder again, sliding it back into its place. In its place on the desk, the Master of Lists tenderly placed an armband, thin metal.

“As your file says, you already have experience working with Sidonis Logistics,” said the Master and Terry’s blood ran cold in his veins. The colour dropped from his face as he could hear the words before they were even said. “You will continue your work there. Finnly has been briefed - he will serve as a mentor since so few deaths are planned for the next few days. Do not forget to take your Haptic, Mr. Berghit.”

Finnly hopped down from the desk with a yawn. They walked from the desk as Terry played with the little bracelet device in his hand.

Then came the panic, an alarm somewhere overhead. The massive hologram of the planet flickered for a moment before a large marker appeared over the planet’s northern provinces. A subtle hush went through the crowd of immortals who stared up at it before a word rang out in a unison of whispers - “reapers’.

In the instants that followed, Terry watched the immortals draw out their Haptics, typing into them before a light overcame them, leaving nothing where the once stood. Even the Master of Lists watched as they left, one by one.

“It’s not the end of the world,” said Finnly, staring up at the globe. There was the faint sound of worry in his voice. “But you can see it from here.”


	4. Reintegration Syndrome (part 1)

Finnly took Terry back to Grimsby, watching as he clutched to his stomach and fell to the ground.

“You get used to it eventually, guy.”

“God, I can’t believe you all do this,” he retched as his inner ear did another loop. It was hard for him to imagine doing this again and again.

“ _We_ all do this, guy,” he said. “You’re one of us now. One of us. One of us!” The skeleton continued to chant as he walked away, towards the office that Terry had left only a short time ago, the chanting getting quieter and quieter.

Terry looked at the metal bracelet in his hands, the ‘Haptic.’ He wound it around his wrist, noticing the vague shimmer, like the purest of silvers. As it wrapped around his wrist, he felt something tap against his wrist on the inside of the bracelet.

He walked in the general direction of the chanting, hoping that Finnly knew which direction to go, as he stared down at this thing - a completely immobile piece of tech that somehow seemed to pulse against his bare skin.

It reacted to his touch, a large holographic screen opened up in front of him. Data streamed across it, a constant flow of information from all around the world. He saw another image of the planet, the bright red dot still flashing where Reapers were detected - he wondered if it was his imagination that the red dot had grown while he was looking at it.

He didn’t have time to ponder as the chanting suddenly ceased. He looked up to see a familiar parking lot in front of a drab grey office building. The small sign in the perfectly-tended garden declared in the hum of neon, “Sidonis Logistics Corp.”

He felt like retching again as he noticed the “Help Wanted” sign in the window, below it his former job title - “Senior Data Entry Specialist.”

Finnly watched with a smirk on his face. “Fun times in this place, huh?” he asked, patting Terry on the back with a firm gloved hand. “When you’re done repainting the parking lot, you need to go - the Listmonster made arrangements for you already.”

“Won’t they know who I am?” Terry asked, dreading what that could mean. If his boss found out he was immortal, it’d be the end of short work days or any hopes of sick days. He’d miss the early mornings, faking a cough to practice his backhand at the tennis courts.

Finnly looked at him, as blank a face as possible -already more blank than anyone else could manage, wondering exactly how long it would take Terry to think about what that would mean. As the seconds ticked by, he became more and more hopeful Terry would figure it out on his own, even resorting to pointing at his own pale white face.

“Guy, come on!” Finnly pleaded. “Don’t leave me hanging here! You think a skeleton gets served onion rings? We’ve got new identities to them, all part of the immortal vision or whatever.

“I’m not me?” asked Terry. Sitting down next to the small splatter he’d made on the pavement in the parking lot. It suddenly felt so strange to him, all of it. Like the fog had cleared in front of his eyes, but as he looked up to the skeleton, a worried look on his face, the fog drifted back. He was obscured.

“Don’t worry, you get used to this too. If the Listmonster was right, you’ve got about 100 years. Check your Haptic, it’s got everything on you. As for me,” Finnly said, flipping his own device open in front of him. “Kenzington, Franklin Kenzington. 31 years old. Unemployed. Married to Tia. Don’t want to talk about that.”

Terry flipped through the menus on his own Haptic, taking to it like it was second-nature. It was all there, a complete and completely fabricated life for him. A face similar to his own stared back, like a cousin or an uncle, not much older than Terry himself. As he read, he learned more about Thomas North, his new alter-ego. It shared a disturbing amount of parallels with his own life - 23 years old, college drop-out, same light brown hair and even the same green eyes.

“Thomas, Tom, Tommy,” he said to himself. He thought about who this person was, just like him. “Is... was he a real person?”

“Never asked that myself,” said Finnly, kicking innocent stones into the lawn, skimming through data on his Haptic. “If so, I really want to see whoever Franklin was before he was me. Skydiving, scuba diving. Guy would have owned a private jet, I bet, if he wasn’t such a tree-hugger.”

Terry thought about Thomas, suddenly getting an uneasy feeling like he was invading someone else’s personal space. Terry had his credit card stolen only a year ago, cigarettes and candy showing up on his monthly bill. He was furious about it, how would Thomas react?

The skeleton saw the worried look on his face, kicking a particularly large stone into the lawn. “Feel better, yet, guy?”

“No,” said Terry, his voice glum. “You shouldn’t kick stones into the lawn. Lawnmowers will throw them and kill people.”

“Urban legend,” said Finnly, searching for another stone in the area. He’d created a barren patch of asphalt that was free of all debris and a patch in the lawn that was anything but. “Basically nobody gets killed.”

“I read it on the internet,” said Terry, slowly rising to his feet and brushing himself off. He looked up at the windows, imagining a stone flying through one and hitting his supervisor in the face, knocking those stupid glasses to the floor. Terry tried not to smile. Terry failed miserably. “Guess there are worse places for a death though.”

“You’re talking to the closest thing we’ve got to a grim reaper, guy,” said Finnly, trying to sound like he was calling upon some ancient wisdom, like a wizard reading from a thousand-year-old tome in a forgotten cave. “I see all those who pass beyond the void! I’ve been doing this for two-hundred years and not one person in the region has ever died from a lawnmower chucking a stone.”

The Haptic on Terry’s wrist tapped him again, as though it ran two fingers against his wrist. He jumped at the feeling, immediately going to swat it away and laughing with an awkward tension when Finnly laughed. The screen displayed a reminder: “Ten minutes to interview. Do not be late. - Master of Lists.”

The nausea was back with a fury.

Finnly sighed, seeing the distress that Terry was in. It was getting dull for the skeleton to watch. “Look, guy, I know it sucks. It’s not normal for this kind of thing - I guess someone wanted to shit on you pretty thoroughly to make an exception in your case.”

“Real assuring,” said Terry. He started to pace back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists. He’d been the same way first trying to get this job. Interviews weren’t a strength of his and he was painfully aware of this.

“I’ve got some favours that the Listmonster owes me,” said Finnly with a sigh. “I’ll see what I can do while you’re doing your interview. I make no promises though! If this comes from higher-up, there’s nothing he can do. Now go in there, get the job, and see if he’ll train you right away. I’m not paying for your food.”

“Thanks Finnly,” said Terry, holding his breath so he wouldn’t have to catch it again. He tensed his fists a few more times before he started to walk toward the building’s door. He could just make out a familiar outline just inside the windows, a jolly looking man that could be only Mort. That calmed him down a lot.

“Oh, and Terry,” said Finnly, turning to walk away from Terry. “Don’t try and get close with your friends. Terry’s dead, right where he should stay.”

“But-”

“I know it sucks,” said the figure of the skeleton with a shrug. “You won’t listen though, guy, you’ll try and tell them. Just know their brains literally aren’t capable of knowing. They might figure out you’re an immortal, and even that’s a bad idea, but they _literally_ can’t understand so don’t even try. No need to confuse the poor mortals. We really need to come up with a name for the compulsive need for newbies to mess everything up.”


	5. Reintegration Syndrome (Part Two)

Finnly left without a parting word, muttering something about repetition, seeing this again and again. It left Terry alone with the great off-white beast made of ugly stucco and shining glass. He pushed open the doors.

A startled noise to the left immediately grabbed Terry. It was a mix between a snort and a snore. The tell-tale bead of drool hung off Mort’s face, reclining deep in the comfortable seat in the lobby. He’d jumped up like Terry was a predator and he was facing his last moments in the eyes of a predator.

“Sleeping at work again, Mort?” asked Terry. “You’ve gotta stop doing that, guy.”  
Terry caught himself saying the word, internally flogging himself about Finnly’s influence already taking place in his brain.  
“You know my name?” asked Mort, staring blankly up at Terry as though he was a completely different person, as though he was Thomas North. “Are you from HR? I swear, I really need the time off. We were close, like best friends and he went to my wedding and I was going to go to his - not that he seemed like a marrying kind of guy or even had a girl but --”  
“Mort,” said Terry, bringing the ramble to an abrupt end. “It’s hard to believe, I know, but I am Terry.”  
It looked like there was a glimmer of thought going in somewhere behind Mort’s eyes, like he was trying to process this. Terry knew he’d found a way around the whole death problem. Terry, of course, was wrong.  
“Oh,” he said as though he was as small as a mouse. “His name was Terry too.” 

A man walked into the lobby, holding a piece of paper as though it would cut him at any moment, dangling it pinched between a finger and thumb. Terry suppressed an internal groan as they locked eyes. From behind the glasses, shrewd set of eyes looked over him with a practiced patience.  
Terry felt like a piece of meat being assessed for its fat content as he stared back, clenching his fists again until he could feel the nails bite into his palms.  
“Mr. North?” asked the man, adjusting one of the suspenders below his red sports jacket. It took Terry a moment to respond. “You’re early. Not a fan of that. My name is Lucius Kurt. You may call me Lucius or Mr. Kurt. I will be assessing you today.”  
“I...” Terry stammered. Lucius sucked his teeth and wrote something on the piece of paper as he stammered. Terry wondered exactly how he was supposed to do this without even a resumé. “Yes, Mr. Kurt. Should we go to your office?”  
Terry followed the man through the office, seeing the familiar faces of the people he’d only barely talked with. When he passed the HR cubicles, he stole a glance towards the empty desk where Lila normally sat. There was a stack of papers but nothing else. 

The office they ended up in was small, and it was one that Terry was very familiar with. The chair neatly fit him, even the impression on the seat. Nothing had changed except for a small folder pinned to a corkboard with the name “Terry” written out in red pen. Small pieces of paper stuck out of the top at odd angles.  
“Your resumé was exactly what we were looking for, Mr. North,” said Kurt, adjusting his glasses and removing a piece of paper from a folder on his desk, placing it in front of him and running a finger down it. “Two years of data entry before this. I understand that firm closed and lost many of their records. You had nothing to do with that, did you, Mr. North?”  
“I...” Terry stalled, his brain trying to catch up with what was being said. The Master of Lists had come up with everything he needed, it seemed. “No. I did my job and then I went home. None of the back-room politics or management things.”  
“Good,” he said. “A worker who knows that he has a place. I despise social climbers in the workplace. You will be taking over for a very dear worker of ours, Terrance Berghet.”  
Terry cringed as he said Terrance. It had always been said when he’d done something wrong.  
“You probably saw,” the manager continued. “Hit by a bus. Unfortunate, really, he did great work here. Constant praise from the higher-ups. Never really found out what it was he did,” he chuckled to himself for a moment before clearing his throat. “I spent quite a bit of time trying to find out and all that seemed to happen was him throwing piles of documents in his trash bin and never entering the data, but I’m sure he somehow got his work done.”  
“He doesn’t sound like that great of a worker,” said Terry.  
“You aren’t exactly an expert, are you? When can you start.”  
“Right now,” said Terry, regretting the words as soon as they left his mouth.  
“Well then, you’ll have to clear the desk yourself but you’re the only applicant so far and you’ve met all our requirements so consider yourself hired,” said the manager. Kurt readjusted his glasses, taking them off and rubbing them on his jacket before placing them back onto his nose, watching Terry with squinty shrew eyes.

His desk was exactly as he’d left it except for a note placed tenderly on the keyboard. At the top of the page, littered with clip art of steaks and barbecues, was “Memorial BBQ.” Terry chuckled to himself a little, realizing that Mort had planned all of it for him.  
It is a strangely intimate gesture, to learn of your own memorial party.  
He didn’t have time to enjoy the situation though, as his manager crumpled up the paper and threw it into the waste bin below the desk. “I don’t think you’re invited,” was all that he said. Terry took his place at the desk. “Corporate put instructions for you here. Memorize your employee number.”  
Kurt replaced the ruined invitation with a plain white envelope. Terry had seen them before, they were never good. It was the same kind of envelope he’d seen others clutching to with tears in their eyes.  
“We use our own proprietary software. Follow the tutorials,” said Kurt. “Don’t come to me if you have problems, call corporate. Okay,” he sucked his teeth again. “I think that’s all. We’ll see what you get done by the end of the day.” 

Terry reached forward and flicked the head of one of his bobbleheads, a bull dog. Skippy just nodded back at Terry as he sighed, deep and slow. In a few minutes, he was logged on and starting to wade through the pile of paperwork.

The envelope just waited there, stuck in behind his monitor. 

He heard someone talking behind his back, somewhere over his shoulder. “Already filled his spot, huh? What an ass.” It was a familiar voice, a feminine voice, the kind of voice that really hurt Terry. He spun in his chair, making eye contact with Lila.  
The glare he got back was chilling, like staring into a loaded gun. She was talking to one of the guys from accounting, one who stood a little too close to her. Terry just sighed. What could he do? He spun his chair back, face to face with the warm CRT screen that hummed in front of him.

“I’m going to die here,” he said to himself. “I’m immortal. Fuck.”


	6. A Shelf to Sleep On

It was back to the status quo for Terry, or at least it was as close as it could ever be. He passed Lila on the way out, still glaring holes into his forehead. He passed Mort, still sleeping in one of the chairs in the lobby, though he’d switched sides - a familiar form was paperclipped to his shirt, a notice of time off from the HR department.

Just one obstacle stood between him and the door, drinking coffee by the litre and adjusting his suspenders again below his sports jacket. He sucked his teeth as Terry got close.  
“Mr. North,” said Kurt. “I’m glad I caught you. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Terry trained you. Your work has all the same characteristics, the way you fill out the forms and never double-check, the way you consistently forget to submit title pages for over half the forms that need them.”   
Terry couldn’t think of a lie fast enough, instead he just laughed.   
“I like you, Mr. North. Corporate has a policy of watching you for a week, you know, probation,” he sucked his teeth again. “Listen, I’ll get Mort to clear off your desk since he’s probably going to be here for several more hours.”  
“See you bright and early tomorrow, Mr. North.”  
“See you.” 

“First day of work, guy, I’m just so proud.”  
Terry jumped when the skeleton leapt out of the bushes. He couldn’t resist a smile growing on his face though as Finnly patted him on the back, knocking some of the wind from his lungs. Terry tried to speak but just coughed, instead pointing to the bushes.  
“I was watching the lawnmower to see if it would throw the rocks.” He pulled the hood back a bit over his skull, showing a large fracture just above his right eye, one that wasn’t there earlier. “You may have a point about throwing rocks in lawns, guy. I’m sure it’ll buff right out, right? Right...?”  
Terry snorted out a laugh or two, “Yeah, Finnly, I’m sure it’ll buff right out.”   
He rubbed a gloved hand against it for a moment, hissing like it hurt. He pulled the hood back over his head, shading his face again as the smile returned.   
“So, guy, got a place to live yet?”  
Terry stopped walking, just staring off into the buildings that rose up in the distance as part of the city centre. Somewhere in that cluster of apartment buildings and office spaces was his own place, a little townhouse nestled in between buildings that kept it permanently in the shade.  
“I hadn’t thought about that,” said Terry, bowing his head slightly. “Can I live with you?”  
Finnly raised his hands in defence, “woah, guy, at least buy me dinner before you ask to move in!” He laughed at his own stupid joke. “I don’t think the Mrs. would appreciate that very much, guy. Even I’ve got to find a place to stay tonight.”

He wasn’t sure how it’d happened, but Terry ended up walking down the laneway towards his property.  
The skeleton had followed him, talking about birds and trees. He babbled about traffic, about working in an office. To Terry, it was a welcome distraction. Every time the conversation lulled, he couldn’t stop thinking about the glares his closest friend had given him, about the vacant gaze he’d gotten from Mort. It sent shivers up his spine.  
Any time he could get not thinking about it was time that he needed. Distraction was Terry’s lifeline and Finnly was nothing but a distraction.   
The leasing office, a short grey brick building, had a new sign hung up in the window. “Property for lease or rent.” Terry couldn’t help but feel offended at it, out of all the things he’d seen today, something about seeing his home on the market just drove a spike of betrayal through his skull like the bumper of a speeding bus.  
“Ouch,” said Finnly, pointing to the sign.  
“I’m getting my place back,” said Terry, a worrying amount of determination in his voice. He ran a hand through his hair and stepped into the office. It smelled of the same antiseptic that it always had, like the back rooms were used for surgery during the off hours.  
“Yes, hello?” asked the timid woman behind the counter, looking over Terry with hopeful eyes. “Are you here for leasing property? We have nice property, very nice home for you and,” she looked at Finnly, standing in the doorway, looking around the office like he was expecting an ambush. “Boyfriend?”   
Terry looked back at Finnly who just shrugged towards him. “What’cha thinking, love?” he asked, trying to stifle the laughter that broke through anyway.  
Terry just groaned at the skeleton. “Yeah, I want the place.”  
“Oh thanks Gods,” said the woman. She reached under the desk and pulled out a worn-out clipboard. She rushed over to the printer, churning out page after page of forms that Terry had seen far too often. “Garbage packed, not put out yet. Consider first month rent on the house if you dispose. Thank you.”  
She clipped the paper to the board and passed it over the counter. Terry’s fingers briefly brushed hers. She felt as cold as the grave but she smiled sweetly at him, showing her yellowing teeth.   
“Is that even legal?” asked Terry.  
“Legal enough,” she said without hesitation.

Unlike his desk, the home was a mess.  
Around the room, dozens of trash bags were placed neatly in piles in the centre of rooms. The furniture was all still in place, the paint, some of the wall-directions clung to the walls while, in other parts of the room, the pale outlines of picture frames were all that remained.  
“Wow,” said Finnly, pushing past Terry in the doorway. “I’m sorry, guy, but this place is, well, kind of a shithole.”  
Terry just scowled at the skeleton, ripping into the garbage bags and spreading his things around the room. Finnly couldn’t help but laugh, watching the tame man tear into the black bags like a barbarian, disemboweling its prey.

Finnly watched for hours as Terry did this, from one room to another. By the time he was done, the sun had set and the rooms had been populated with memories, or at least their expensive facsimiles. Most of them were just bought online, there were no stories behind them besides the fact that, to Terry, they looked like they’d fit in the room.  
Terry had almost completely forgotten about Finnly. He sat down next to the skeleton with a huff, shoving Finnly to one side of the small loveseat. In his haste, Terry hadn’t plugged in any of the electronics except for the small paper lamp standing in the corner. It didn’t stop him from instinctively reaching across Finnly for where the remote had always sat, where he’d placed it only a few minutes prior.  
Terry brushed against Finnly as he reached, causing the skeleton to hitch a breath and lean back, away from the intrusion into his space.  
“Woah, guy, personal space!”   
“Then pass me the remote!” yelled Terry, louder than he realized. It was met by a thump on the floor above him. It was a practiced routine by now, just another bit of muscle memory when Terry yelled up again. “Sorry, Larry!”  
“Gods,” said Finnly under his breath. He pointed to the fridge. “Got any drinks?”  
Terry knew that Finnly watched him unpack the bags in the kitchen first, loading can after can of diet cola into the fridge, along with a few lone cans of beer. “Help yourself, but bring me a diet,” said Terry, nodding in its direction. 

Finnly was up and back in seconds flat. One beer and one diet cola clutched in his gloves. He tossed the can at Terry as he opened his own. They sat there in silence for a minute, staring into their reflection in the blank screen of the television.   
“So,” said Finnly finally, breaking the uneasy silence before taking a heavy drink. “Day one. What you expected in the life of an immortal?”  
“Fuck,” said Terry, throwing his hands up in defeat. “They can’t all be like this! You can’t tell me that the greats like Oberon or Siphra had to file paperwork in an office building for hours. I won’t believe it!”   
“I wasn’t around to meet Oberon before he chose the Void but Siphra mended clothing for the first decade of her immortality,” said Finnly, tipping the can directly over his head and letting the last drops fall into his open mouth and out of existence. “You should talk to her sometime. She’s not as interesting as she sounds but at least she can tell you about when the Reapers first attacked. Hey,” he said, like he’d just remembered something crucially important to the conversation, either that or the cure for cancer. “She even made this hoodie. God, do you know how hard it is to buy clothes that don’t just get caught up in ribs or wind tight around other bones?”   
“I can feel it, Finnly,” said Terry, finishing his own drink and tossing the empty can to the middle of the floor. “I’m going to end up working there forever. That place is going to be my life, for the rest of time. How do you deal with something like that? Do we get retirement?”   
“Well,” said Finnly, clearing his throat and feigning a cough or two. “Uh. There’s no retirement but some investments or whatever can’t hurt. Lots of immortals talk about the stock market. I don’t understand a word of it but I guess you buy imaginary things and they pay you for it..?”  
“So you don’t have investments then,” said Terry. “And you clearly don’t work. They pay you for your work.”   
“Oh,” said Finnly with a laugh. “I wish. They were talking about it but, well, I messed up and now I’ve got another 100 years of free labour before my Thaumaturgy. Gods,” he sighed. “I can’t wait for that.”   
“Thaumaturgy?”  
“You are put in front of a council of your Patrons. They ask you a question, something like: “Do you have purpose?” They ask you three times. If you say no every time then poof, that’s it, you’re done and you’re sent to the void.”  
“Why would anyone want to be sent to the void,” asked Terry. He was incapable of picturing anything but some kind of eternal nothingness.   
“People weren’t meant to be around for hundreds of years, guy,” he leaned back in the couch with another sigh, putting his hands behind his head. “We decay, not physically but in our minds. You’ll see. Stuff just stops mattering, like you get tired of caring, like the world just slowly slips away from you.”   
“Wow,” said Terry. He suddenly felt small next to Finnly. The skeleton seemed to know so much to Terry, like he’d been around forever. To hear him want it all over just cut something deep inside the new immortal. He got up and stretched. “I think I’m going to bed. The couch is yours.”  
“Thanks Terry,” said Finnly, as though he was lost in thought. He leaned forward as Terry walked off, resting his elbows on his knees. It took a dozen trips around the rim of the beercan before he got tired and threw it to the floor next to Terry’s. “Thanks.”


	7. Fine Lines and Consequences

The snoring coming from the living room was undeniable as Terry laid awake in his bed. He stared up at the ceiling, waiting for his alarm to go off. He could feel it instinctively, the one predictable moment in all of this.   
He had no idea how long he slept, how long he’d just stared at the ceiling along with his thoughts. For a moment, he had just bathed in the absurdity of it all but those rare, self-reflective moments never lasted long for Terry.

The tie was around his neck, the white collar of his shirt pressed firmly against his neck as he tightened the knot. 

Finnly was nestled deep into the back of the couch, pressed hard against it. An arm dangled over the edge and hung down, his gloved fingers just grazing the laminate wood flooring. He snored, slow and repetitive. 

Terry thought about waking Finnly, shaking him up and getting him to leave. Terry was afraid of something though, something he couldn’t quite pin down - almost like he was afraid that Finnly would leave and he’d just never come back.   
He walked at an agonizingly slow pace, keeping his footsteps silent, toward the fridge. He opened the door and pulled some of the beers to the front of the shelves.   
He looked up at the clock, almost time to leave. He reached into his pocket, finding the house keys that had been left in the apartment. Then came the panic, the quick and inescapable feeling of sheer otherworldly terror. He had no cellphone. He looked around in a flurry, under the counters, in the fridge, running his hands carefully around the sleeping soul reclamations officer in the couch, even running back into the bedroom before he realized something.  
His phone was on his body. It was in the pair of pants he was wearing when he’d died. 

He just sat down for a moment in complete silence, listening to the sound of his own breath. Then he stopped, just stopped breathing. He waited and waited, ignoring the urge. It grew stronger and stronger but his vision never dimmed.  
He gave in, breathing in heavy. He ran a hand through his hair, clenched and unclenched his fists a few times before he was out the door.

“You’re late, Mr. North.”  
Kurt was standing in the hallway near his desk.   
“First you’re too early,” he took a sip of coffee out of a stained mug. “Now you’re late. I hope we can expect a little more... professionalism tomorrow. Corporate has sent me some extra paperwork about you so I hope you don’t need too much help.”  
“Okay, Mr. Kurt,” said Terry.   
“If you have any problems,” said Kurt, walking towards his office and calling over his shoulder. “Mort is around somewhere.” 

When Terry sat down on his desk, a flyer was waiting, identical to the previous one that was still in the trash bin. Terry stared at it for a moment before he folded it up and put it into his pocket. He logged into his computer and started with the already large pile of forms.   
Terry wondered why this job hadn’t been automated years ago, why none of this was just scanned and fed into a computer somewhere. He’d always wondered about that. Skippy just nodded away on the desk.   
Terry gave it another flick before he grabbed the first folder and opened it up.

A few hours later, it was time for a break. He’d finished the first pile of paperwork and was almost ready to finish the next. The breakroom called to him with the smell of coffee but he could hear chatting coming from that direction, and one voice in particular - the grating, razor’s-edge voice of Lila.   
For coffee, he would risk it.  
Lila watched as Terry passed her, keeping her eyes trained on his face, even as she drank from her mug of coffee. She carefully measured his every move as he tried to ignore her.   
“New guy,” she said with a sneer. “Scab, I want to talk to you.”   
“I’ve got a lot of work,” said Terry, struggling to pour a cup of coffee from the chipped coffee pot.  
“Yeah, Terry’s work. You come in a day after he’s gone, what? Were you out for his job before he was gone too?!” She dropped her mug, stepping back as it smashed on the floor sending shards and coffee to the far corners of the room.   
Terry stood in silence, watching the woman cover her face with a hand, the other wrapped tightly around her waist. He thought he could hear a faint sob before what he could see of her face hardened. She wiped away at her eyes before meeting his eyes.  
“I’m sorry. Terry was a good friend of mine,” the words sounded hollow but there was a hint of something there, a residual emotion left over from the outburst. “My name’s Lila.”   
“Terr-” he paused, stuttering a few times. “Terrific. I’m Thomas.”   
She walked out of the room, dragging coffee-stain footprints behind her. Terry took a sip of his coffee and sighed, looking at the mess on the floor.   
“It’s not my job,” he said to himself, walking to his desk.


	8. In Which We Meet Mrs. Black

His home smelled like pancakes and fire as he stood in the doorway. Terry was sent into panic mode, rushing inside and tossing his bag to the floor. He saw movement in the kitchen, some quick flurry of beige, black and white that caught his attention.  
Beige and black discs lined the counters, stacked high. Others, more black than beige sat on the floor. In the middle of it all, Finnly was trying to unstick another beige disk from a pan. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Terry.   
“Oh,” he said suddenly, stopping frozen with a fork firmly embedded in the pancake. “You’re home.”  
“What--”  
“Pancakes, guy. Thought you could use something to eat, I know I could.”  
“There’s --”   
“A lot. Yeah. I dropped the box in when I was mixing them,” he said as the pancake slowly slid off the pan, falling to the floor. Finnly looked at the small amount of pancake still stuck to the end of the fork. Terry watched him slowly pull the fork towards his mouth and eat what was left. “I, uhh, maybe got a little carried away. But now you don’t have to cook!”   
Terry just looked around him, more in shock than anything. One of the towers looked almost entirely burnt, more like charcoal disks than fluffy batter.   
“You’re not angry,” asked Finnly, passing him a plate of particularly well-cooked ones. “Are you, Terry?”  
Terry grabbed the plate from the skeleton, motioning to the fridge. “There’s syrup in there. Bring it to the couch with you.” He grabbed a fork from the drawer with his silverware, starting into the pile as he walked over to the couch.  
Finnly let loose a sigh of relief, enough to knock another pile of pancakes onto the floor. He scrambled to gather them all back onto the plate, emptying it into the trash. With the eye of an art-dealer, he scanned the pancakes. One pile had only a single burnt one near the bottom - his target.  
“So,” said Terry as Finnly joined him on the couch, grabbing the syrup that loosely hanged out of the pocket of his hoodie. “Not much of a cook, huh?”   
“Naw,” he said, stuffing an entire pancake into his mouth. “Never really had to, guy.”  
“And no job?”  
“Well, not really, no. I live with a lady,” he said, shoving another entire pancake into his mouth. “She’s a local politician, Tia Kenzington, and I’m a bit of a cover for her, she’s more of a ladies’ lady. Worries it’ll affect her political career.”  
Terry just sat there in stunned silence. “So you’re the recluse Kenzington husband?”  
“I get out sometimes! I just don’t like being seen as a politician. Gods, I don’t. All slimy and gross.” Finnly shuddered. “At least I get a cut of the profits since I’m part of that lovely family.”  
Terry was only two pancakes in by the time Finnly had finished his plate. The skeleton got up and dropped his plate in the sink.   
“I should get going, guy.”  
“Hey,” said Terry. “Just one more thing. How are you supposed to deal with all this?”   
“Eat them..?”   
“No, not the pancakes. All this, gods and guardians thing, this life after death.”   
“I, uhh,” Finnly stalled in the doorway. He just stared at Terry, the flickers in his eye sockets burning bright. “Oh!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin, made of a perfectly polished black metal. He flicked it over to Terry, it landing somewhere on the floor. “Business card! Call Mrs. Black.”  
With that, the skeleton had disappeared out the door. 

Terry was left in silence, for the first time in what had felt like days. He wanted to say that it felt good, but all it really felt was a sudden crushing loneliness. The entire world had left him behind. 

As he fished out the coin from under the couch, he had an even worse realization: they didn’t leave him.  
He left them. 

The coin felt impossibly cold to the touch, like it was a metal that did not belong to this planet. There were tears in his eyes as he wiped away the dust that covered it. On the top was an ID code, a nonsense number.   
The Haptic on his wrist buzzed as the coin got near it. It pulled towards the coin, the light tapping on his wrist getting more and more urgent until it was more of a soft buzz than a light touch. He tapped the coin and the Haptic together, the screen materializing and the code now implanted into it. 

Up in the top of the window was a list of contacts, the first was a picture of the Master of Lists, the second was Finnly, but the third was new. Looking back at him was a woman with pristine hair, a crisp suit and glasses that hid her eyes. 

He stared at her for a while, wiping his eyes clear. He tapped the picture and the haptic began to rhythmically tap his wrist until the sound of a voice caught Terry’s attention.  
“Terrance,” said the smooth voice. It was a teacher’s voice, a voice that made Terry want to listen. “A pleasure to finally speak with you.”  
“Mrs. Black?”  
“Of course,” she said, a patient smile evident in her voice. “How are you doing today, Terrance?”  
“Terry, please. I need to talk.”  
“I’m afraid that I’m a little busy at the moment, but how about an hour? Will you be available then?”  
“Yeah, but --”   
“We’ll talk more there, Terrance. Drink a glass of water and have a shower. If it does not help, you will at least be hydrated and clean.”   
“Where do I--”  
“I’m sure you will find it, Terrance. I make it quite easy.” 

He did as she told him, drinking water and showering. As he stepped out from the warm air of the bathroom, he felt a little better. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He dressed, grabbing a t-shirt and pyjama pants from the closet, just in time to catch a knock at the front door.   
He ran over to it, just catching out of the corner of his eye, the stack of pancakes still littering the kitchen. He swung the door open and just stood there, stunned. It didn’t lead outside, instead to a waiting room, complete with faded plastic plants and sagging chairs. A man sat in a desk at the far side, in front of an opaque glass door with the words, “Mrs. Black, Post-life counselling.”   
It was with slow and cautious steps that he made his way into the waiting room, carefully padding his feet along the carpeted floor as though it might disappear at any moment.   
“Mr. Terry?” asked the smiling young man at the counter. “Right on time for your appointment.” He tapped the Haptic on his wrist once, “Mrs. Black, Mr. Terry is here for you.” He paused. “Yes, Mrs. Black.”   
Terry watched him type something into the computer before reaching under his desk. The sound of a printer ran for a moment then stopped as the man pulled his hands back with a small stack of pages. “She’s a little old-fashioned but she is by far the best,” he handed Terry the papers. “Don’t look. She’ll see you now.”


	9. The World Around Us

“Terrance,” said the woman as he took a seat in front of her desk. She sat in front of a heavy set of ornate drapes in a room surrounded by bookshelves filled with tomes. “Did hydration help?”   
“A little, Mrs. Black,” he said, feeling suddenly timid in front of this woman. Her glasses seemed to catch the light, the bright light making it impossible to see beyond them. She was as tall as he was and he could feel her eyes piercing through him even behind the glasses. “I’m sorry, I needed to talk to someone.”  
“Never apologize for needing help, Terrance,” she said. Her voice was harsh and soothing in the same moment. She adjusted the tie that hung around her neck and then reached for the papers in his hand. “You’ve been through an extraordinary trauma. Weakness in a time of healing is nothing to be ashamed of. What do you need to say?”  
“Excuse me?”   
“You said you needed to talk. When people say they need to talk, they mean that there is something that they are unwilling or unable to say. Tell me, Terrance, what is it that you cannot say?”  
The glint of her glasses seemed to pull him to stare into them. He thought for a moment, trying to figure it out. “I don’t know.”  
“Think harder, Terrance. What do you need to say?”  
“I’m afraid.” The words almost seemed to slip out of Terry, like he was watching himself say them rather than saying them himself. “I’m afraid that I died alone and I will stay that way.”  
“Did you die alone, Terrance?”  
“Yes,” said Terry. “On the curb,” he stuttered a few times. “Alone in the rain.”  
“Why does that scare you, Terry?”  
“I’ve seen the afterlife,” he said, bowing his head slightly to stare at his shoes. “It’s the same as when I lived. But I was happy when I was alone. I don’t understand.”   
She looked over at him and nodded quietly. He looked up at her, wondering if she was going to say anything at all or if she expected him to continue. There was nothing else he could say about it.

“I lived in a small grass hut outside of a cave, Terrance,” she finally said. “When I was alive. I told the future by the direction of the sun, by the smell of flowers, by bones of the creatures we ate. There was no spoken language.”  
Terry struggled to understand what she was saying, as though she was speaking an entirely different language. She smiled as she watched his mind work in front of her.   
“Terrance,” she said standing and turning from him. She opened the drapes. Outside, people moved, thousands of people. The tall buildings meant only one thing, they were in the capital. Through the window, the only building that Terry could recognize was the Aelinari History Museum. “My body is in a display case in the museum. I’m an antiquity.”  
“One of the mummies?”  
“Close,” she said. “You are a smart man, Terrance. One of the bog bodies pulled from a swamp where Aelinar grew many hundreds of years after I fell in the mud and drowned.”   
She said it with such little emotion behind it that for a moment, Terry thought she might be joking.   
“Before my death, I was a seer,” she continued. “I knew nothing of the world, never thought to even wonder about it. When I died, I met the first Guardians, those trained by the Creator. Those who are now gods. Death is not an ending, Terrance, not for us. For us, death is a metamorphosis, the chrysalis in which we grow to become something unfathomable. You are experiencing growing pains.”  
“When do they stop?”  
“When do you stop growing? Never, Terrance. If you stop growing, you are dying. There is no state between.”  
She tapped the device on her wrist. “Hunter, two glasses of water, please,” she looked up at Terry. “Sparkling?”  
“No thanks.”   
“One sparkling, please. Thank you, Hunter.” 

She talked with him for at least an hour more, learning about his life and his job. He told her about his friends and his apartment. Through it all, she seemed entirely unfazed. 

“Terrance,” she said as he stood to leave. “We lived our lives surrounded by death. We built ideas of it, expectations. When our experience does not meet our expectations, we experience dissonance. It burns us, we cannot function.”


	10. Pivot

It was a quiet night for Terry. Mrs. Black hadn’t helped him to feel much better but she had at least illuminated why he felt so wrong. He ate pancakes and watched some television, still paid until the end of the month if Terry remembered right.  
It was another night with little sleep for him, staring up into the ceiling and wondering where everything was headed moving forward.

When his alarm went off, he was already up and moving. He showered and dressed himself, out the door a few minutes later with a leftover pancake hanging out of his mouth.  
He ate it slowly as he walked, taking the same path as before. He stopped where, only a few days ago, he stood and watched himself bleed out and die. He shuddered, watching another bus pull up to the spot. 

When he got off the bus a few minutes later, the sun had risen above the tops of homes around him, just starting to crest through the office buildings ahead of him. He stopped in his tracks as a bush next to him shook.  
It looked like it had danced.  
He stopped and stared at it, watching its leaves gently sway in the breeze.  
As he turned to step away, it shook again. It did not stop shaking as Terry reached out a hand to touch it. Something inside skittered out of the bush, small like a baby rabbit. Terry reached a hand out to pull some of the leaves away.  
It leapt out at him, a giant skittering, biting blur of grey. It latched onto his arm and he felt it bite him or sting him, a flash of pain burning out the rest of the world as he tore it off and threw it to the ground. It had legs, a lot of legs.   
He stomped on it, feeling something crack beneath his boot. It grabbed onto the bottom of his boot as he drove it into the ground again and again, until it was more goo than chitin.   
“Fuck,” Terry said, looking at the thing under his foot. He struggled to catch his breath. He ran a hand over his arm, feeling something swelling, like a large welt. When he pulled his hand back, there was nothing there. No welt. No Terry.  
A small round hole seemed to go straight through him, right to the other side. In a panic, he turned his wrist over to examine the other side of the hole where he saw only smooth skin. He cradled the wounded arm in his other hand.   
It was like a small piece of him no longer existed. His head hurt and he felt dizzy.

“Finnly,” said Terry into the Haptic. “Finnly, I need help!”   
There was no answer. Instead, the connection closed. 

He knew that Finnly’s home, the Kenzington Manor, was close by. His brain was a thousand individual thoughts, fractured like a mirror.   
It rose in front of Terry, a giant building of steel and glass surrounded by beautiful gardens spanning most of the property. Terry didn’t look at the garden, avoiding every shrub along the path to the front of the manor, clutching his wound.  
He knocked, rang and screamed at the heavy wooden door. It took only a few moments for it to swing open, a tall, thin man filling the space as best he could. To Terry, he just looked like the definition of a butler, classical and traditional.  
“Can I help you?” asked the man. His voice was deep, shaking Terry’s already trembling body to the core.  
“Finnly,” said Terry. “I need Finnly.”   
“Master Finnly,” said the butler, a resentful tone underlying the name. “He is currently out in Frobischer Park. You must be Mr. North. I have been instructed to help you should you need it, under Master Finnly’s orders.”   
“Please,” begged Terry. “Bring me to the park. I need to see him right now.” 

The black sedan rolled up alongside the park. In the distance, the city centre rose up over the ornate trees that lined the road and the paths. The butler, entirely silent during the car ride, said that Finnly will be found on a bench by the tallest pine tree in the park. He pointed to a pathway, one of the many branching paths.   
“Follow the path, you will find the man,” he said, closing the door and driving away, leaving Terry on the curb. 

True to his word, Finnly was on a bench along the path. Terry approached from behind. He looked over a tree, a massive, ancient pine tree. His hood was down, exposing the bare bone at the back of his skull.  
He heard Terry approaching, looking over his shoulder to meet gazes. “Terry,” he said, an unusual state of quiet in his voice. “It’s good to see you, guy.”  
“Finnly,” Terry was almost out of breath. He steadied himself against the bench, supporting as much of his weight on it as he could. “Fucking bugs. Why didn’t you tell me that bugs kill us?”   
“What are you talking about?” Finnly stared at the shaking, sweating man in front of him. “Guy, if we’re going to start having conversations, you’ve gotta stop starting them with nonsense.”   
Terry held his arm out in front of Finnly, the throbbing, swelling edges around the nothingness that the bite left in its place. Finnly grabbed his arm, fingers too tight around the sensitive skin, bringing a hiss of pain from Terry.  
“Sit down,” said Finnly. He slid over to one side of the bench, leaving an opening more than big enough for Terry. “You’ll be fine. I need to think for a moment.”  
Terry did as he was told, looking over the wound.   
“I come here to think,” said Finnly. His voice so quiet it was almost drowned out by the rustle of leaves around them. “There’s something strange about this place. The entire universe, everything in creation from the gods down onto the smallest specs of dust, this feels like a focus.”   
“What?” Terry could barely listen to Finnly. The pain was subsiding, but only slowly.  
“This is the centre of the universe. It all turns, everything, around this place. That tree,” he said, pointing to the ancient pine. “That tree has no idea how important it is, but I can feel it.”  
Terry looked up at it, this supposedly magical tree. To him, it just looked like any other pine.  
“You know what’s funny?” Finnly asked with a small chuckle. “This place is being torn down next week. They’re moving the park to put overflow parking in this place. They’re taking everything but that tree and the ground under it. This time next week, the entire universe is going to pivot around a parking lot filled with people who are late to work.”   
Terry just sat in silence, trying to understand what Finnly meant.   
“Sorry,” said Finnly, sniffling slightly and trying to cover it up with the most fake cough imaginable. “We’ve got work to do.”


	11. Love and Other Fantasies

The office was dead-quiet when Terry showed up for work. A quiet hush seemed to fill the space of every desk where before there was always chatter, laughter, complaints - all the signs of life. It was Friday, the last day before Mort’s BBQ.  
Normally these days were the most active of all, people fueled through the promise of ribs dripping in barbecue sauce, burgers with homemade relish, bowls of potato salad and beans deep enough to bathe in. But it seemed that even in their imaginations, the barbecue sauce lacked all flavour.   
Terry sat down in silence at his desk. Even Kurt was absent from his horizons, locked away in some office. It was a small mercy on a day like this. For Terry, these days always passed the slowest.  
He started on the new stack of paperwork dropped off at the end of his shift the previous day, plastered with ink stamps proudly declaring these documents belonged to Janus Encryption Services. A few pages in and he needed a break.   
His back cracked as he stood. Like the walking dead, he made his way to the break room seeing familiar faces all along the way. None made eye contact with him, none greeted him with more than a nod. None but the woman.   
“Hey Tom,” she said to him. She sounded quiet, without any of the frustration or the anger that he’d heard from her before. Somehow she seemed smaller, like she’d puffed herself up. She reached into the pockets on her jeans, pulling out a small, perfectly folded slip of paper. “I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said, locking eyes with him. He could see the deep bags under her eyes, telling stories of staring at the ceiling as nights went by. “I don’t know if you got an invitation but these are kind of a big deal here.”   
The slip shoved into his hands was one that he’d seen all over the office during the past few days. It was another slip for Mort’s memorial BBQ.   
“I was already thinking of going,” said Terry, folding it in half and offering it back. “Maybe... I mean, would you want to go with me?”   
“Tom,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “Tom, I’m still reeling over Terry. I can’t just... I mean. I’ll be there but not with anyone. Sorry.”   
“Oh,” said Terry. He was surprised at how empty his gesture felt. He had expected to be torn in two whenever he asked her out, knowing for sure that she would have said no - whether Terry or Tom asked. Instead, he just shook it off. It was nothing to him. “That’s fine. I just figure.” He laughed a bit to himself. “It’s nothing. Nevermind.”  
He slipped past her, taking one last glance at the way her black hair was tucked behind her ears. She looked back at him for a moment, brown eyes meeting blue before she rushed back towards the HR cubicles.  
The coffee was still warm when he got there. His shoes stuck to the floor where the fading brown coffee puddle still hadn’t been cleaned. He reached for a mug hanging above the sink, one covered in fading, flecking images of cats and dogs. The dark coffee filled the mug with just enough in the pot for a second cup.  
“No good can come from this, Terrance.”   
He spun around to meet the voice. The room he was in wasn’t a break room anymore. Instead, he held a pot of coffee and his mug in the office of Mrs. Black. She crossed her legs and folded her fingers over the long skirt as she leaned against her desk.  
“I figured Finnly would have warned you against this,” she said. “He may not be smart but he’s been doing this long enough to watch many ruined by these desires.”  
“Huh?” asked Terry, more interested in how he got into the bookshelf-lined office than anything she was saying.   
“Your affair with Ms. Lila Romanova. It cannot continue, Terrance.”  
“What’s so wrong about it? Can’t a guy like a girl he works with?”   
“Immortality is a lonely state. Not because we can’t interact with the living, but because we choose not to. Love is not something we partake in. We had it in life and it is something that we must leave behind, until perhaps we pass into the void.”  
“No,” said Terry, taking a deep drink of his coffee, deep creases of concern and frustration forming on his face. “You can’t stop me. It’s inhumane.”   
“Leave the humans to worry about what’s inhumane, Terrance.” She smirked at him for a moment. “Have you heard the tale of the Fall of Ledas? You must have, it’s told to children across Aelion.”

He had, of course, heard the legend of the Fall of Ledas. A booming town hundreds of years ago somewhere in the East, Ledas was a beacon to all the world. This was due to the Solar Guardian, a powerful immortal who led the people by example.  
She was loved unconditionally. She loved unconditionally - specifically one man, Berat. They spent their days and nights together. She protected the city and he provided her with everything she desired. When the first Reapers invaded, Ledas was one of the first places hit. Like the hero she was, the Solar Guardian held them off alone for days.  
There was one Reaper, one that she was not prepared for, a creature named Azmodus. So smart and conniving was this creature that it watched her, saw her life, saw Berat. While she fought with its brothers and sisters, Azmodus snuck into the city and killed Berat, bearing his head on a pike when he confronted the Solar Guardian.   
She destroyed every Reaper but Azmodus. The creature injured her gravely and left, leaving her the head of Berat. The city was in ashes, more damage caused by the Guardian herself than by the Reapers. The survivors of Ledes, only a few dozen in total, left the city forever, wandering through deserts to seek a new home. 

“You are not told of the true implications of the story, Terrance,” she said. “The Solar Guardian was no different than you or I, Terrance. Her name was Emine. She was born in Ledes, long before the Reapers, and she died there only two decades later.”   
“Emine,” whispered Terry, as though the fact that the Solar Guardian had a name somehow changed everything. Like it was some big revelation.  
“After seeing Berat, she went mad with rage, with sadness. She destroyed it all, Terrance, Ledas. The people, the buildings, the culture, all over one dead mortal.”   
“I get it,” said Terry. Even he could feel the conviction in his voice, the feral stubborn will.  
“If you don’t mind, Terrance,” she said, hostility buried shallowly in her voice. “I’m not done. She was retrieved by the Primordiales Invictas days afterward. They say that she had wept for days without reprieve. She was brought before the Council of her Patrons.”  
Mrs. Black looked up towards the sky, just giving Terry a sliver of the whites of her eyes before she continued.   
“When asked what her punishment should be, she looked up at us. I have never seen eyes like that before, so hollow. There was nothing of the Solar Guardian left in her at all. The guardian was dead, standing before us. In her place was only power, pure and feral and filled with nothing but malice.”  
She paused for a moment, lost in thought.   
“She said that only one thing could be done. She asked for the Rite of Nihility.”   
“Nihility?” asked Terry.   
“Never have I seen anyone face nonexistence in such a way. There would be no void for her. She was erased.”  
Neither of them spoke for a moment until Mrs. Black looked back down at Terry. He could feel her gaze, a small sample of the pure willpower that she’d spoken of.   
“It isn’t like that,” said Terry.  
“It never is in the case of love and other fantasies.”


	12. The Big Man in White

It was the big day, Terry could feel it as he opened his eyes. The first thing he did was make an active choice, the first task of the day: a nap. When he finally rolled out of bed an hour later, he stretched and scratched his stomach.   
Finnly was right, the wound on his arm was closing. Now it was nothing more than a pinprick, a mosquito bite. When he opened the door to the bedroom, a familiar sound filled the small space - a dry snore. He sighed, rolling his eyes.

Finnly was on the couch again. His face was pressed into a cushion and he was sprawled, overflowing the small surface and onto the floor.  
Terry just walked past, into the kitchen, noticing that the last few beers in the fridge had moved themselves to the trash bin. He pulled the last tray of pancakes from the fridge.   
When the timer on the microwave went off, a snore in the living room ended abruptly with a cough, the thud of a skeleton meeting the floor and the groan that followed it all like a little signature. 

“Good morning, Finnly,” said Terry. “Just let yourself in now, huh?”  
“Yeah,” Finnly sighed, rubbing a gloved hand over his skull. “Don’t worry, I’ll cover the repairs.”   
Terry looked in horror towards the door. It looked fine but his eyes were still fogged with sleep. He rushed it, running a hand over the edge of the frame.   
He almost didn’t hear Finnly break out in laughter over the sound of his own adrenaline-fueled heartbeat. Finnly held in his hand two little pieces of metal, one curved and one bent harshly at a 90-degree angle. Both were worn.   
“You’re pretty daft, guy,” said Finnly between snorts of laughter. The laughter only got louder when Terry muttered something under his breath. The laughter was knocked out of him when Terry shoved him into the couch, nothing excessively hard but enough to feel it.   
“Jerk,” said Terry, turning to the bathroom.  
“So what are we doing today, Terry?”  
“I’ve got a BBQ to go to,” he said over the sound of rushing water.   
“We’ve got a BBQ to go to,” said Finnly. Terry groaned from the bathroom. He could hear the grin even that far away from him. 

“Welcome,” said the big man in white. He rubbed a hand towel over his forehead, wiping away some of the sweat. The pale man smiled to him, a kind of forced cheeriness. “Mort Polman, but you probably remember me. You’re wondering why I’m wearing white, huh? Well it’s a family tradition --”  
Terry instinctively tuned him out, scanning the faces in the small suburban garden. It seemed like everyone was here, from Damian to Kurt. Even Lila’s face was just visible over a pile of lettuce and tomatoes placed precariously on a picnic table.  
“So you’re celebrating death?” asked Finnly.   
“I guess you could say that. I mean, everyone dies right? And we celebrate birthdays, why not deathdays? I had an aunt die at a birthday once,” he said, a huge smile spreading across his face. Finnly stared at the man like a tentacle had suddenly crept its way out of his nose. “Wasn’t expecting that part of the surprise party, no siree. It was my first ever surprise party and --”  
“Uhuh,” Finnly said, a passive reaction as he watched Terry drift off into the crowd. 

“Lila,” said Terry as he sat next to the woman. She looked like she was ready to burst into flame in the black clothing she wore.   
“Mr. North,” she said, a small smile crossing her face. “I’m glad you came.”  
She looked up at a woman running through thin orange hair. The woman carried a tray of deviled eggs around with her, twenty or thirty eggs balanced on it. Terry watched as she shoved an egg in around the small e-cig in her mouth. She was talking with another woman, arms crossed.   
“Mrs. Giger spent most of the time trying to talk to me before you got here. She means well but,” she said, pausing. “Well.”  
“Yeah,” said Terry. “Who’s the other?”   
“Corporate,” she said in a hushed whisper. “From out West.”   
The corporate woman looked over at them the instant Lila had mentioned her. She met Terry’s eyes and stared him down with a vaguely hostile look on her face until he looked back to Lila. Lila just shrugged before she flinched as Finnly slid into the seat on the other side of her from Terry.   
“Gods, Terry,” he said, out of breath. “He never stops talking. First it was deathparties and morbid surprises, now he’s talking about bank robberies in the region.”   
Lile and Finnly met eyes and her whole body language changed in an instant. “Hey,” she said, turning away from Terry towards the skeleton. “Name’s Lila.”   
“Uh,” said Finnly, trying to look past her to Terry. She shifted to fill his vision again. Terry got a lovely look at the back of her head. “Finnly.”   
Finnly slid out of the seat as quickly as he’d slipped in and sprinted in the opposite direction.   
“Your friend’s a great guy, Tommy,” said Mort, carrying a tray covered in tinfoil the bulged around the edges. “We talked about all kinds of things. Seemed to even know Terry! Small world, huh?”   
Mort laughed but all Terry could see was the big floating hologram of Aelion in the Observatory.   
Mort sat down for a moment, the smile fading from his face. “I’m glad that I’m making new friends, you know? Did you know Terry?”  
Lila looked down at the salad for a moment before she sniffled, stood and walked away. Mort watched her leave, a grim frown on his face.  
“Yeah,” said Terry. “I know him. Knew him.”  
“Great guy. A little impatient at times but you always knew his heart was in the right place,” he said. “I’m glad you could make it. I can’t afford anything good for a funeral but this will just have to for ceremonies.”  
Terry perked up at the word, staring Mort dead in the eyes. The world felt crushing to him, a sudden immeasurable weight as Mort began to choke on his words.   
“You and Finnly should come,” he finally said. “We need more people to speak.”   
“I don’t know if that’s appropriate.”  
“You and him never got along, huh? Terry was a great guy though, so forgiving. I bet he’d invite you himself if he could. I think he’d still want you there.”  
There was a deep sadness in Mort’s eyes, something that Terry couldn’t ignore. They pulled on him, tugging every bit of willpower he had left.  
“Yeah, okay.”  
“You know, Tommy, you’re a good listener. A lot of people, they think they’re good at listening, but they tune out after the first little bit. But you? You’re always paying --”   
The Haptic on his wrist tapped him frantically. He could practically feel the urgency in it. Finnly manoeuvered through the crowd, coming to stand next to the table. “Guy,” he said, slamming both his hands onto the table. “We’ve gotta go.”   
Terry briefly saw the corporate woman look down at a similar bracelet on her arm, watched her pull out part of the holographic screen and just nod to herself. Finnly either didn’t see or didn’t care as he grabbed Terry’s arm.   
“Thanks, Mort,” he said over his shoulder, rushing Terry through the crowd. “Lovely BBQ, hope you have another!” He turned to Terry and whispered to him, “please, Gods, kill me if I’m ever in an elevator with that guy.”

The Observatory was quiet compared to last time when Terry opened his eyes. He stumbled a few steps, coming to lean on one of the bookshelves. He tried to mentally stabilize the room around him, watch Finnly giggle at the other immortal.   
“You didn’t throw up this time, guy, that’s an improvement.


End file.
